At least 13,000 people [the latest figures range from 15,000 to 50,000] attended a rally in Paris on Sunday to protest against what they say is a crime wave targeting the Chinese community in France, police said, after a Chinese textile designer died after being mugged last month.

Demonstrators waving French flags and sporting T-shirts printed with the slogans “Stop violence, muggings, insecurity” or “Equality for all, security for all” marched from the Place de Republique square to the Bastille in eastern Paris, asking for more police protection.

Chaoling Zhang, a 49-year-old textile designer, died last month after five days in a coma after being attacked in the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers by three men who stole his bag.

Members of Aubervilliers’ large Chinese community, home to many Chinese immigrants, said that the death of Chaolin Zhang was the latest in a string of targeted assaults.

At first it was just stealing bags, then it was stealing bags with violence, and now it’s stealing bags and killing. It could happen to anyone,” 31-year-old Wang Yunzhou told Reuters TV.

The people here are angry. We can’t feel relaxed in the street, and if we don’t even get a basic welcome in the police station people start to wonder,” he said, adding that he moved to France from Wenzhou in south east China twenty years ago.

Aubervilliers, which has a population of 77,500, is home to a large Chinese community connected to the garment trade. Some 600,000 ethnic Chinese people live in the country overall, including French citizens.

Last month, 27 Chinese tourists were robbed and their driver sprayed with tear gas as they boarded a bus that was to take them to Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport. The incident raised fears that Chinese tourists, important luxury spenders, would stop coming to Paris.

Tourist traffic in Paris has dropped significantly since attacks by Islamist militants last November, leading to sharp declines in sales for luxury goods makers but also for the capital’s retailers, hotels and restaurants.

Attacks on Chinese, Korean and Japanese tourists are also frequent in the French capital as robbers believe they carry large sums in cash and their suitcases are stuffed with luxury goods purchased in Paris, according to police.

In May, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo traveled to Beijing to reassure Chinese authorities that Paris – the most visited city in the world – had taken measures to beef up its security.

Fitzgerald comments:~Now what is striking about this Reuters article is that it nowhere identifies those who are attacking the Chinese. Nor are they identified in this story from Channel News Asia, nor in this one from RFI, nor in this from Le Figaro, nor in any of the half-dozen other versions of the story I’ve checked. Not one of them, that is, dares to make mention of “Islam” or “Muslims,” even though in Paris and in Aubervilliers, the Chinese are protesting the violence visited upon them from Muslims, calling it “anti-Asian racism.”

When I posted my piece on the attacks that the Chinese immigrants in Aubervilliers, a heavily Muslim suburb on the outskirts of Paris, endure from their Muslim neighbors, I noted that Muslims have been robbing, extorting money from businesses, physically attacking, and even killing Chinese immigrants who have the misfortune to live and work near them. I should also have noted that robberies of the Chinese in Aubervilliers have tripled in just one year. Some explain this by suggesting the Muslims feel humiliated because the Chinese clothing and textile warehouses, and import-export shopping malls, are so successful, standing in silent economic reproach of the Muslims, who tend to live off welfare benefits for as long as they can (some are very good at turning it into a lifetime benefit), and have failed to demonstrate any entrepreneurial flair, unlike the Chinese migrants. But that’s nonsense. The Muslims in France aren’t ashamed of living off welfare; they’re proud they can manipulate the system, and claim their informal Jizyah from French taxpayers. The main reason that the Chinese are attacked in Aubervilliers is the same reason that the French are attacked – they are Infidels, and thus a legitimate target for Muslims. Chinese property is as much a form of Jizyah as are the welfare benefits offered by the French state.

This harassment of the Chinese near Paris has been going on for a long time. It got so bad that at one point the Chinese ambassador to France was forced to pay a visit to Aubervilliers to try to calm his countrymen down. And in 2013, the Socialist mayor of Aubervilliers, Jacques Salvator, suggested that the violence against them could be halted if Chinese companies would agree to hire more Arabs and Africans. The Chinese were not assuaged, countering that “Muslims do not work as hard as the Chinese, that they are more demanding, and that they complain too much.”Anyone familiar with Muslim work habits would need no convincing.

Since that demonstration in Aubervilliers two weeks ago, apparently little has been done to placate the Chinese. They described to reporters covering their demonstration in Paris their feeling of frustration at not being listened to by the French authorities who, they said, fail to realize what kind of daily terror they endure. And in addition to the attacks on Chinese who live in the suburbs, there has been a steady increase in the number of attacks targeting Chinese (and Korean, and Japanese) tourists in central Paris. These Asian tourists are known both to buy luxury goods to take home with them, and to carry lots of cash. Just the other day, a gang of six (unidentified men) jumped onto a bus just about to leave a hotel for the airport, and made off with luxury-filled luggage belonging to the 27 Chinese tourists on board. The attackers in Aubervilliers have been identified as Muslims, but in the stories about attacks on Chinese tourists the criminals are not identified. But reading between the lines suggests that those attacking the tourists, like those known to be attacking the Chinese in Aubervilliers, are Muslims, and for a simple reason: had any of these criminals been French, the press, which tends to protect Muslims, would certainly have been eager to describe them as such. A refusal to identify them, in the current climate, almost certainly means they were Muslims.

So on September 4, in Paris, according to the police, at least 15,000 Chinese showed up to demand “security for all.” Chinese sources claim that as many as 50,000 people may have turned out to show support. It’s a fantastic showing, in any case, and what’s more, no one can dismiss it as a “right-wing” or “racist” rally because it’s not white Frenchmen, but Chinese who are protesting against the “anti-Asian racism” by their attackers. Since some white Europeans may still be reluctant to stand up for themselves against Muslims, then perhaps they will find it easier to stand up for the Chinese in France as, in the U.K., it may be easier for the British to stand up for Hindus and Sikhs, and then Europeans will begin to realize – as I wrote two weeks ago and will repeat verbatim here – that wherever you look, it’s not a case of Islam against the West, but of Islam against All the Rest.

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